


what about the wild things, little beast?

by sxldato



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Blood and Gore, Bloodlust, Dissociation, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Loss of Control, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Destruction, Violence, and basically everybody, bucky is a fucking disaster, he also hurts steve, i don't know if this could be considered abuse??? but consider this a warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 14:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3137900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sxldato/pseuds/sxldato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You think you understand why they put you in a cage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what about the wild things, little beast?

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to do something that focused on Bucky and lack of self control, to be honest.  
> I think being completely controlled by other people for such a long time would make _self_ control virtually unimaginable. And if you haven't been making your own judgement calls or even considering yourself human, I feel like getting angry could lead to some serious reckless, violent impulses.  
>  I don't know, I guess most of the fics I've found about Bucky's struggle to become a whole person again tend to be written as a very private thing that he keeps inside himself, which is definitely a big part of it. But I wanted to write something where he also just explodes with rage and goes completely feral.  
> Unbeta'd. I'll go back through it tomorrow and correct any mistakes, but I worked on this instead of my homework so I need to go pretend my life is in order right now

There have never been many constants. Things have always been and will always be changing, and time doesn’t slow down long enough for you to keep up. The seconds that flash by are stretching you thin. You’re afraid to blink, because sometimes you close your eyes and decades pass as you comfort yourself with the dark.

When your brain gets too tired from fighting this fight (you’re certain you had only signed up for one war, and it was supposed to have ended seventy years ago) you feel yourself slide back into old habits. Old habits, like seeing red and needing to splatter it across the ground like paint. Old habits, like mentally reciting all the ways to break a person’s most vital bones, and sometimes attempting it if the smallest thing makes all the gears in your head click into place.

You want those gears to stop, to grow cobwebs and rust; but they’re slicked with oil, ready to spin if you do something as simple as give yourself a paper cut or if someone scrapes a knife against a plate the wrong way. You lose yourself. You want to see blood, and whether it’s yours or someone else’s never seems to matter.

The metallic stench is a comfort when you are a beast. And blood is warm—a small relief when everything else has always been so cold.

You think you understand why they put you in a cage, why they treated you like an animal. It’s because there’s something inside you is entirely, uncontrollably feral. Maybe they were the ones who had created it, but you doubt they had intended for it to go this far, to penetrate so deep into your mind that everything else shuts down when that switch flicks on.

Your nails are ragged and bitten. Your hair is matted and limp. You bear your teeth like you could tear someone’s throat open, and chances are that you have. Seventy years of slaughter is a long time. You know your flickering memories only scratch the surface of all that you’ve done.

The man in the stars (different from yours), the one with the halo whose name you sometimes forget, is almost always the one to get hurt when you drift away. If he’s not, it’s because he’s trying to stop the gashes in your own skin from dripping all over the floor. He doesn’t seem to mind when you hurt him. He only gets sad, and you think it has more to do with you than it does with the bruises on his face.

When you bleed, he takes you to the bathroom and runs hot water over all the red. It cauterizes the wound, he says, and you don’t know why because he knows you know that. Sometimes you need stitches. The man with the wings sews you back together, and he’s good at it. He talks to you the whole time and doesn’t get mad when you don’t say anything. You think it’s because he used to not say anything, too.

You have a lot of stitches.

It doesn’t hurt—this body is not your body, you can barely feel anything, it’s like all your limbs are made of metal instead of just one-- but you think it makes other people sad.

You don’t like it when the man with the halo cries, but you also hate this body. You hate this body because it isn’t yours. It’s hard to decide between not making him upset, and defacing the body that belonged to people who hurt you so badly. So badly, that the only way you can stop feeling pain is by hurting others.

You always want to say sorry. You always think you need to. But when you're coming back to yourself, your voice does not work. Your jaw is clenched shut. You don't trust yourself enough not to scream.

The man with the halo doesn't understand that the anger you show isn’t personal, that you aren’t angry with just him, but angry at everything. All you have is your rage; it’s the only thing you can hold onto. It swallows you up, fills your throat and makes it impossible to breathe. You can’t sleep with the blankets on (you can barely sleep at all) because you feel like you’re being strangled.

So you sleep on top of a lot of pillows. The man with the halo holds your hand every night as your eyes flutter shut. He sings to you, a song about some boy named Danny who’s being called by pipes, and you want to ask how you could possibly deserve this kindness after all that you’ve done.

When you wake up drenched in sweat with screams ripping from your throat, he’s still there. This is one of the few times when you know you won’t hurt him. Exhaustion is still too fresh in your body for you to lash out. Your fury never entirely settles; it’s always bubbling somewhere below the surface; but when it dies down, when it tapers out into something controllable, you’re left with a crushing realization of what you are, and what you’ve become.

And then you cry.

You know that the body of an adult male is sixty-five percent water, but the amount of tears that fall from your eyes is so profuse that you fear you will dry up. You’re convinced every time you cry will be the last, that one day you’ll just run out. It never happens, and you think maybe it’s this body’s way of apologizing. After all it’s put you through, and keeping you trapped within it, it’s decided you should be allowed to cry as much as you need, until the pain of over twenty five thousand days is compensated.

The man with the halo keeps his arms around you until you stop, and he keeps holding you if you tell him to. You ask if he needs sleep and he says no. You think he’s lying. You tell him that. You think he laughs.

\- 

He and the man with the wings go running together every morning unless you’re having a bad day (when you create new holes in the walls; when the knives are hidden even though you can make a weapon out of anything, even your own body; when you smash mirrors with your flesh fist because you don’t recognize the person staring back at you), and a woman with brilliant red hair comes to stay with you while they’re gone. She isn’t afraid of you. Something inside you tells you that a long time ago, she used to be.

She catches you staring at her a lot, but she never questions you about it. One day, you suppose she sees the confusion flickering in your eyes, because she then tells you that you were the one who trained her.

You taught me everything, she says, and despair slams through your lungs.

You’re pretty sure you apologize, but your ears are ringing and you can’t hear yourself speak. You say it again, and again, and again. You didn’t mean to poison someone else with your own misfortune. You’re sorry, you’re sorry, you’re so fucking sorry.

Your chest hurts and it’s hard to breathe, but you aren’t crying. Your tears are saved for the cold, unforgiving moon.

She sits you down at the kitchen table and makes you a cup of tea. You don’t know how to ask for things, don’t know how to tell her that you need a lot of sugar in it, but she does it without you saying anything. She says she figured you would like things sweet after nothing but bitter supplements.

You say you’re sorry one more time, because you need her to know that you mean it.

She tells you it’s okay, but you have difficulty seeing how any of this could ever be okay.

It gets easier to breathe. You drink the tea. You decide you like her company and the way she speaks to you.

When you finally call her by name, her green eyes sparkle and she smiles. You decide you like it when she does that, too.

\- 

Some days can’t be fixed that easily. Some days, you’re meant to destroy. You don’t think that part of you will ever go away.

You wake up with fire pumping through your veins. You need a knife in one hand and a gun in the other, you need to cut through anything that gets in your way because you’d been stomped on and spat at and kicked for so long, and it’s time they got theirs. There’s an ache in your heart that won’t go away until you feel blood splattering against your skin, thick and hot.

You need to kill. You need to kill every last one of them.

The man with the halo—Steve, his name is Steve, you know his name is Steve, _you’re his best friend_ —is still home because the night before had been rough, and he hadn’t wanted to leave you on your own this morning.

He tries to stop you, and you go straight through him. You haven’t been able to pull a weapon (a weapon that isn’t you) on him before, not since that day over the Potomac, but this body is enough. He calls you by a name that isn’t yours, he’s begging you to stop, that they’re all finally gone, that Pierce is dead, _he’s dead Bucky, please listen to m_ e—

You’re tired of following orders.

He’s bloody and bruised, his ribs are cracked in three places, and his arm is bent at a painful looking angle when you finally make it through the front door. But you don’t make it very far. New York is loud, louder than you had expected, and your heart races with the promise of an anxiety attack. You try and make yourself small and ignore the cold sweat that’s beading on your brow as you stumble down the street.

You’re five blocks down when you get too dizzy to walk. You lean against the wall of a building and let yourself slide down. You’re torn between being afraid and wanting to shred everything within a five-mile radius of you to bits.

You do a bit of both.

You pull up the right sleeve of your sweatshirt and dig your fingers into the delicate flesh of your forearm, creating abrasions with the friction from your metal fingers. It doesn’t hurt enough. You keep going.

The underside of your forearm is a mess of bruises, scrapes, and blood, when you see the man with the wings heading right for you. He looks angry, upset. You know those feelings well.

You struggle to your feet and the blood from your arm drips onto the pavement. You want to hurt the man with the wings. You want to hurt everyone. No one saved you; no one saw the desperation in your eyes when they were staring down the barrel of your gun; no one realized that there was someone inside this body who wanted off of this goddamn ride.

Right now, you’re not sorry for those you hurt while you were hurting. You’re only sorry for what they made you do, and that you let them that far into your head.

This, right now, is _all_ you.

You lunge for the man with the wings—to pull the other one off, maybe—but it becomes more of a stagger forward than an aggressive move, and he catches you in his arms before you can collapse to the pavement.

I’ve got you, he says, and tells you you’ll be all right, and that he’s going to take you home.

Your hands dig into the fabric of his shirt as you clench your jaw to fight back tears. You can’t be weak in the light of day. You can only cry in the dark.

 -

He doesn’t ask about your arm or why you did it, only has you sit on the kitchen counter while he patches you up. He explains that the man with— _Steve_ —called the woman with the bright red hair who speaks to you in Russian (you’re always able to respond even though you don’t remember learning the language), and she got him to a hospital so _he_ could be patched up, too.

You ask if you’ve broken him again.

The man with the wings tells you that you haven’t, that Steve is a tough guy and that he can stand a few fractured ribs and a broken arm.

You tell him that you remember a time when Steve couldn’t pull through something like that.

He says it’s good you’re remembering, and you’re not sure you agree.

Remembering hurts; and when you hurt, all you want is to make others hurt, too.

 -

When Steve comes home, you hide, putting aside the feeling of being trapped so you can huddle underneath the blankets. You never knew how soft they were, how warm. You think they would be okay to sleep under as long as they stayed below your arms.

The woman with the red hair, whose eyes say more than her mouth does, likes to check on you. She talks to you from the other side of the door. You don’t say much, sometimes you don’t say anything, but she still speaks. She’s good at holding up both ends of the conversation.

You tell her (through the door) that you think there was a time when you loved her. You ask if it’s true.

She’s quiet for a long time. And then she says that yes, you did.

You wonder if you could still feel that way about anyone, but you don’t ask her that.

 -

You venture out on the third day of Steve’s return. He’s sitting on the couch, reading a book, one of his arms in a sling. You announce your presence by apologizing.

(You don’t speak a lot, but when you do, it’s usually the phrase _I’m sorry_. You think that says a lot about you as a person, if you can be considered one.)

Steve only smiles at you, but you don’t know if that means he’s happy. Sometimes Steve smiles when he’s sad. You try not to worry about understanding this too much, because no one else seems to know what’s going on with Steve, either.

He says he’s glad you’re okay.

You don’t know where he got that ridiculous idea, and then you realize he means he’s glad you’re still here, not _dead_. You’re not sure if you share his joy at this news. Reason says you should have died seventy years ago.

You tip toe over to the couch and carefully ease yourself into it. Steve sets his book down and puts his arm around you. You rest your head on his shoulder.

You cherish these few and fleeting moments when your fury is containable, when you feel safe. But you also worry, because the seconds keep ticking by, and eventually you’ll run out of time, you won’t feel safe anymore.

You don’t know the next time your blood will reach its boiling point.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts are always welcome!


End file.
